The Myth of the Women’s Vote

WASHINGTON, DC – Among the clichés that deserve to be thrown out after the recent presidential election in the United States is the idea of a “women’s vote.”

It may seem surprising that only 54% of the female electorate voted for Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominated for president by a major party. But while gender is a strong marker for how Americans think about certain issues, it is not the best predictor of how they will vote. It turns out that female candidates do not face a single gender gap, but rather multiple gender gaps.

To be sure, a superficial look at past election results reveals an enormous and persistent difference between men and women voters overall. According to Pew Research, the last presidential election in which men and women voted the same was the 1976 contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. In this year’s election, women favored Clinton by 12 percentage points, and men favored Trump by the same margin. Men favored George W. Bush by 11 points in 2000, and women favored Obama by 13 points and 11 points in 2008 and 2012, respectively; but until now we have never seen double-digit gaps in both directions simultaneously.

But this still does not mean that the gender gap tells us much as a first-order factor, especially if we consider other gaps among demographic groups. If we sort by race or ethnicity, we find that white Americans favored Trump by 21 points, while Hispanics and African-Americans favored Clinton by 36 points and 80 points, respectively.

Meanwhile, voters with different education levels were further apart than in any election since 1980. College-educated voters backed Clinton by a nine-point margin, while people without a college degree backed Trump by an eight-point margin.

A New York Times analysis of exit polls found that voters with annual incomes below $50,000 backed Clinton by about a ten-point margin, while voters with incomes above that level split evenly between the two candidates. This indicates that, at least in this year’s election, ethnicity and education were much more predictive than income.

As it happens, they were also more predictive than gender. Ninety-three percent of African-American women and 80% of African-American men voted for Clinton. But 53% of white women and 63% of white men voted for Trump, while only 43% of white women and 31% of white men voted for Clinton.

Similarly, Clinton won the support of white, college-educated women by six points; but she lost white non-college-educated women by 28 points and white non-college-educated men by 49 points. And if we look just at Republican voters, the gender gap vanishes almost entirely: 91% of Republican women and 92% of Republican men voted for Trump.

This all points not to a single gender dynamic, but to one refracted through multiple social and economic lenses. For example, as CBS News noted, Clinton’s failure to match President Barack Obama’s performance with African-American voters was “entirely due to black men” not voting for her – though why this was the case remains unexplained. And, despite her candidacy’s historic significance, Clinton’s performance with white women voters was no better than Obama’s performance in 2012.

We know that Republican women voted according to their party affiliation and not their gender. But Trump also seems to have reached white women not affiliated with a political party, perhaps owing to his campaign’s strategy of hyping women’s anxiety.

This strategy’s success indicates one way that gender can play a role in voter decision-making. Voter data going back 50 years suggests that women, more than men, are moved by the anxiety of changing circumstances and external threats.

For example, in the 1964 presidential election, Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign aired the now-famous “Daisy” advertisement that suggested that his opponent, Barry Goldwater, would pull the US into a nuclear war; a week later, polls found that 45% of men, but 53% of women, shared that concern. Similarly, George W. Bush performed 30% better with women voters in his 2004 re-election campaign than he did in his 2000 campaign, which many political analysts attribute to anxieties among white middle-class “security moms” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Still more recently, in the 2014 US midterm elections, Republicans emphasized the US’s vulnerabilities, and aired advertisements hinting that the Islamic State was directing Ebola-infected agents to kill Americans. Experts ridiculed these claims, but polling suggests that the advertisements were nevertheless effective, and a number of Democratic incumbents, and women in particular, lost elections that year. The Democrats’ focus on reproductive rights had done little to sway women who were already worrying about the Islamic State and Ebola. As I warned at the time, the 2014 election was a trial run for a 2016 strategy to defeat a woman candidate.

Many political observers assumed that this strategy could not possibly work for a Republican candidate who had suggested that a debate moderator was menstruating, joked about dating his daughter, was caught on tape boasting about groping women, and was publicly accused by several women of sexual harassment and assault.

But, just as in the 2014 election, Republican-leaning voters in 2016 were far more concerned about terrorism, crime, illegal immigration, and economic security than they were about issues such as sexism, racism, and inequality.

Where does this leave American women? A female US presidential candidate has now won a majority of women’s votes, and more total votes than her male opponent, and yet her strategy failed to deliver enough votes to secure a victory. In America’s polarized political culture, appeals to one group simply alienate other groups. As long as female candidates are forced to meet multiple, contradictory gender expectations, the US will never close the most prominent gap of all: that between America and the many countries that have already chosen a woman to lead them.

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Comments

Hillary and the American people have been beaten by the Electoral College. Period.

Hillary won those under 40.Hillary won those earning less than $50,000 and those earning less than $100,000.Hillary won unmarried women, married women and unmarried menHillary won the nonwhites by a thumping great margin.And according to the CNN actual election results, she’s got 1.3 million more votes than Trump. A full percentage point lead.

By way of illustration, there are 3.1 million people in North Dakota, Wyoming and Nebraska, and these three very white states together have 11 electoral votes. There are 6.6 million people in Massachusetts and they have 11 electoral votes. (Yes, Mr. Trump, the election is rigged.)

This is the second time within the past 5 elections the people's choice failed to become President because of the Electoral College. This should be a no brainer to fix except for the fact the Republicans largely don't believe in democracy.

Why not? Since George H W Bush was electing in 1988, the Republicans have won the popular vote only once - George W. Bush's election in 2004. With only one win in 28 years, they are clinging to the Electoral College while at the same tine they are doing their darnedest to deny the franchise to certain segments of the populations.

Let's have no more talk about what's wrong with the policies of the Democrats. What's wrong with the democrats is the Electoral College. What’s wrong with the Republicans is people don’t like their policies or their candidates.Read more

It might be more useful to assess the polling data on a state-by-state basis to account for voter suppression efforts as a factor in the election - in terms of turnout and weight in the final tallies. It would be premature to assume that electoral participation is not subject to countervailing efforts by local and state authorities. Read more

There will come a day in which minority votes, too, will fall along other lines - most likely, socioeconomic and class. For 2016, the Year of The Awful Candidates, the Democrats had a less appealing standard bearer than the GOP. That the former party is in free fall is barely addressed by many media, but this is a whole other story. For Hillary, those staunch supporters who remind people at every turn that she won the popular vote are comical. Er, what does it matter? Executives who interview top talent for the best jobs know the resume is just a starting point. The person and what he/she can bring to the table in vision and solutions is more compelling. This was a major stumbling point for Mrs. Clinton. Read more

Notice the panicky peddlers of myth below posting the propaganda they received about this election. Here, for all to see, is the American public giving the single finger salute to fact and reason. Perhaps this is because the facts clearly show the decline of the US relative to other countries is a foregone conclusion, stemming not only from peak industrial output not requiring more labor, or automation, but simply because the starting point post-WWII was a 50% share of world GDP, and impossible level to maintain. This doesn't stop Republicans for citing the anomaly of a ruined post-war world as the paradigm for their greatness. If today's Republicans had reading skills, they might be able to actually discover what real long term trends are in play, or get a grip on the changes coming. Until then, however, it seems we will continue to see this weak-kneed response of lashing out at others to blame them for the policies white voters have been supporting, in the majority, since Reagan. Truth is, it's not opiates that are the major white addiction, is love for Rosy Mirror and her flattery. Like mayflies, their vision is constrained solely to the business of survival, making them certain future victims of those with the ability to take more than today's menu into account. Read more

No offense, Mr. Wallace, but it is attitudes such as yours that could be responsible - at least in part - for Trump's secure victory. You probably consider yourself among the elite thinkers, but you come across more as an angry pontificator. The U.S. is a relatively young Republic and still finding its way. It has fallen well behind in public education, but its universities (including state-supported) are celebrated world-wide. Its economy outpaces that of other countries. Please - no comparisons to Scandinavia and Canada. Those countries' citizens are about 85 percent native-born and highly restrictive on immigration. The U.S. is neither of those. We are a more complex nation in every way.Obama's poor showing for eight years is not the fault of George W. Bush or the Republican Party. Democrats have lots not only the House, Senate and Presidency, but countless governorships and state houses, and have stunningly lost ground in other elective posts. What happened? Really, what happened? This is one for you and your puffed-up elites to ponder. Come back to us when you've had sufficient time to study this issue - no, wait, that's a euphemism. It's a problem, not so much for the country as a whole but definitely for the Democratic Party. Read more

Hillary "veni, vidi, cidi" Clinton was seemingly an imperial figure, while Donald "Golden Throne" Trump is more of a royal/Hussein-like figure. The self-inflicted status of leader of the free world gives the US little chances to get a female president anytime soon, as the leader of troops are usually alpha-males, in other words the various female figures e.g. Merkel and female-like figures e.g. Hollande are subordinates in the super troop of the free world, leading only sub-troops. Read more

Hillary acted as Bill's enabler and protector for many years (as he assaulted women at will). She tolerated, aided, and abetted Bill's numerous extramarital affairs. As a consequence, she could not possibly play the women card. Trump brought Bill's and Hillary's victims to one of the debates. Apparently, Hillary was shell-shocked by their appearance. Why is pretty obvious. Read more

No one knows who won the popular vote in the U.S. and no one ever will. Here is why. Illegal voters and illegal voters are now commonplace in the U.S. The U.S. has essentially zero mechanisms for detecting and removing illegal votes and voters. Obama went to pains to assure illegal voters that they faced no risks. For some actual data, see See "Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379414000973). Since we will never know the number of illegal voters in 2016, we will never know who really won the popular vote.This is one of the key reasons we have the electoral college. Read more

"54% of the female electorate voted for Hillary Clinton..."No, just no. The electorate is all the people in a country or area who are entitled to vote in an election. The vast majority of the female electorate did not vote for HRC. Read more

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